President Donald Trump says a new era of competition is underway and that the U.S. will follow his 2016 campaign doctrine of “America First.” Trump also said Russia and China challenge American influence. (Dec. 19)

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The Associated Press is the essential global news network, delivering fast, unbiased news from every corner of the world to all media platforms and formats.
APs commitment to independent, comprehensive journalism has deep roots. Founded in 1846, AP has covered all the major news events of the past 165 years, providing high-quality, informed reporting of everything from wars and elections to championship games and royal weddings. AP is the largest and most trusted source of independent news and information.
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Seth takes a closer look at how President Trump spent his trip to Asia cozying up to authoritarian strongmen and new information about the Trump campaigns relationship with WikiLeaks.
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Thus far we’ve seen four of Donald Trump’s campaign advisers arrested for their roles in the Trump-Russia scandal, but only one of them went on to serve in Trump’s White House before his downfall. That’s about to change quickly, according to one of the people leading the investigation into the scandal. Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal, who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee and has seen Trump-Russia evidence that we haven’t, just made a startling reveal.Senator Blumenthal appeared on-air on CNN on Friday evening and said “I would predict there’ll be convictions and indictments early in the new year.” This part is actually nothing new, as Blumenthal tweeted something similar on December 30th. But this time around he’s adding that those indictments (and accompanying arrests) will include current and/or former members of Trump’s White House staff. He’s clearly not referring to Michael Flynn, who has already been indicted and cut a plea deal. He’s talking about other people in Trump’s White House. So what’s he getting at, and why is he revealing this now?

Over the past month, several Republicans in Congress have tried to sabotage Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump-Russia scandal. Earlier today, two Republican members of Blumenthal’s committee, Lindsey Graham and Chuck Grassley, made the incredible (and illegal) move of calling for criminal charges against Trump-Russia dossier author Christopher Steele even though they know he’s committed no crime.

Senator Blumenthal is actively fighting back against the dishonest noise coming from Donald Trump’s apologists, by putting some real information out there. It’s a reminder that Trump and his allies are acting in such depraved fashion because they’re desperate and they think the whole thing is about to cave in on them. Blumenthal isn’t going to tell us who’s about to be arrested, for fear of tainting those prosecutions. But he’s sending a message to Trump’s people that they’re not winning this and they’re the ones who will be facing the handcuffs soon.

This week Lindsey Graham completed his transformation from Donald Trump’s biggest Republican detractor to Trump’s most eager criminal co-conspirator. Graham misused his position on the Senate Judiciary Committee to demand that the Department of Justice prosecute Christopher Steele, a man he knows to be innocent. If you’re trying to understand what’s happened to Graham, you can start by following the money and yes, Graham took Kremlin money.In mid-2017, Palmer Report reported on documents uncovered by the Democratic Coalition, which revealed that several Republican office holders took significant money in the 2016 election cycle from a Kremlin oligarch who just happens to have dual U.S. citizenship. Months later, the Dallas Morning News confirmed our story by reporting the same names and numbers (link). The donations were technically legal on their face, but they were highly suspicious. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who wasn’t even running in 2016, took $2.5 million. He then went on to work behind the scenes during the election to try to prevent President Obama from revealing that Russia was trying to hack the election. Someone else notable took that same Kremlin money: Lindsey Graham.

Even though Lindsey Graham wasn’t running for anything in 2016 either, he took $800,000 from this same Kremlin oligarch. Again, the donation was legal. And realistically speaking, it’s incredibly difficult to believe that someone like Graham could be coaxed into throwing away his legacy and going on a crime spree to protect Donald Trump, simply because someone handed him eight hundred grand. So what’s really going on here?

We must get to the bottom of why Lindsey Graham decided to take this highly suspicious if technically legal money from a Kremlin oligarch during a year in which he wasn’t running for office and therefore wouldn’t have urgently needed it. Are there illicit reasons Graham took the money, and if so, are those reasons now being used to motivate him to behave in such an uncharacteristic manner?

This week we learned that even the most “reasonable” Republicans in Congress for reasons known only to them are now willing to burn down every inch of American democracy (and destroy themselves) in order to prop up Russian puppet Donald Trump as long as they can. This week we also learned that Special Counsel Robert Mueller is even more steps ahead of these bumbling, if increasingly demented, villains than we thought. Mueller will make it to the finish line. But where will we be when he gets there?We just now found out that Robert Mueller has had Reince Priebus’ notes for months. That means Priebus flipped on Trump months ago. We also just found out that Mueller has Jeff Sessions nailed to the wall in ways we didn’t even know about. It took us forever to find out that Mueller has had the Trump transition team emails all along. It took us four months to find out that Mueller had arrested George Papadopoulos. Even another two months after Mueller strategically revealed that fact, we still don’t know who all Papadopoulos flipped on. This should all be comforting, because if we don’t know what Mueller is up to, neither does anyone he’s trying to take down, or anyone who’s trying to stop him.

This week has left me more strongly of the belief than ever that Mueller will prevail, and that Trump will be taken down. But this week has also forced me to reconsider my belief, which I’ve espoused since the day after the election, that this would be a four year fight. It seemed all along that the Republicans in Congress would prop up Trump as long as they reasonably could, then cut bait to save their own skin, and try to coast along with whoever lands in the job once Trump is ousted. That’s now out the window.

Lindsey Graham and Chuck Grassley, who have long been two of the most reasonable Republican villains in the Senate, knowingly crossed a line when they demanded that Trump-Russia dossier author Christopher Steele be prosecuted for imaginary crimes simply because he’s an enemy of Trump. This is straight out of a banana republic. More importantly, it means that if and when a real democracy is restored, the likes of Graham and Grassley won’t be able to participate in government any longer; they may not even be able to exist outside of a prison cell. They know what they just staked themselves to with this move. They know there’s no coming back from it. They now have to burn it all down, or they go down.

So we’re now looking at a 2018 landscape in which the Republicans in Congress are so far out on a limb with Donald Trump and Russia, they have no choice but to spend the year trying to burn American democracy to the ground. They’ll try to destroy us before Robert Mueller can destroy them. You think they’ll stop at Steele? Next they’ll try bringing phony criminal charges against Rachel Maddow, or Chuck Schumer, or me, or you. Now is the time to prepare yourself, because the original four year fight to obstruct and run out the clock on this illegitimate presidential term just became a shorter and more focused battle.

The Republicans in Congress have just staked themselves to being not only out of a job, but quite possibly in a prison cell, if they can’t destroy us before we vote them out in 2018. We now have the opportunity to be done with this treasonously criminal Republican Party cartel once and for all, if we can outlast them through November. But we must also soberly accept that the Republican Party is now trying to murder American democracy before election day. For both sides, the stakes just got infinitely higher.

Former Trump Chief of Staff Headlining Louisiana GOP EventU.S. News & World Report
Former Trump Chief of Staff Headlining Louisiana GOP Event. President Donald Trump’s former chief of staff will be a headlining guest at a Republican Party of Louisiana fundraising event honoring U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise. Jan. 6, 2018, at 10:22 a.m …and more »

The new year has already seen disturbing Trump tweets and backlash to #MeToo proving we must keep up the fightFor a brief moment on New Years Eve, as we left the garbage year 2017 behind us, I felt a brief respite from the horror. But then came the morning, and along with it the realization that things are going to be as bad as they ever were. Enter who has the bigger button tweets and more backlash to the #MeToo moment.

She literally brought a chair. I so wish Chisholm were here to see how her legacy is informing the future of politics. https://t.co/sg3sUmW0KF

When you report this you remember she was human: mother, daughter, sister, aunt. Her heart was bigger than the world. It really really was. She cared when most people wouldn’t have. She was good. She only pursued right, no matter what. No one gave her justice.

So they changed the law in Oregon to let people pump their own gas and the Facebook comments on the news story are amazing. pic.twitter.com/MZ7jcBQRUF

Since television is a prominent source of cultural messaging for children, this correlation of foreign accents with bad characters could have concerning implications for the way kids are being taught to engage with diversity in the United States. https://t.co/FVfJoNWlMY